Tanglewood

A 1980 build sits inside the polybutylene window

Polybutylene supply piping was in wide residential use from the late 1970s until it stopped in the mid-1990s. A 1980 house sits near the beginning of that window, which makes the question live rather than settled.

It was inexpensive and easy to install, and it developed a reputation for failing at fittings and joints. Some has performed for decades; some has not. The only way to know is to have the piping identified by material during the inspection rather than inferred from the year.

On a house of this size the stakes are higher than usual, because a re-pipe is priced by the extent of the system and a 5,000 square foot house has a great deal of it. Where it has been replaced, that is a documented selling point worth stating plainly — it removes the largest single question a 1980 house raises, and buyers in this county have learned to ask.

At forty-five years the first replacement cycle is long past and the second is well under way. Roofs should have been done at least once and probably twice — on a house of this size that is a substantial expense each time. Furnaces, air conditioning and water heaters have been replaced more than once. Original windows have generally been changed, and on a large house window replacement is a major project rather than a modest one.

So the questions are when, by whom and with what, and dated records for that work are worth more to a buyer here than almost any cosmetic improvement — because the sums involved on a house this size are large enough to change an offer.

Twenty-six hundred to fifty-five hundred square feet is two markets

A spread of roughly 112 percent means the largest houses here are more than twice the smallest, and they compete for different buyers at different price points. A neighborhood average describes no actual house.

The upper end is the part most likely to be mispriced. A 5,500 square foot house has a small and geographically wide buyer pool: few households need or want a house that size, and the ones that do will travel for a good example and pay for one. That produces a wide spread of outcomes — the right buyer pays well, and finding them can take time. Time on the market at that end is not the signal it would be for a three-bedroom colonial.

The comparable set is correspondingly thin. There may be no directly comparable sale in this neighborhood in a given year, and widening means finding other large houses across a broader area and adjusting for everything crossed — municipality, district, lot, condition, specification. An automated valuation does the widening and none of the adjusting, and it also scales by area, which handles the top of a range badly.

Carrying cost is the other half and it is substantial. More roof, more cladding, more windows, far more heating and cooling capacity, more of everything that ages. At forty-five years, deferred maintenance on a house this size accumulates in absolute terms much faster than on a smaller one.

Heating and cooling zones are close to essential rather than desirable at the upper end. A single zone across 5,000 square feet is not a comfortable house, and retrofitting zones afterward is expensive. Ask how many, and ask which rooms are difficult in August and in January.

So the analysis has to be built within the range: match on size band first, then adjust for lot, position and condition. A sale at one end is not evidence for a house at the other.

The colonial at scale, and what that means for the roof

The colonial is the reference form in this market — two stories, bedrooms upstairs, living space down, a fairly regular plan and a comparatively simple roof — and that regularity is an advantage in several directions.

It gives the deepest comparable data of any form, though at this size the depth thins out considerably. It gives predictable maintenance, because the details are conventional and every trade in the region has seen them. And it gives a simpler roof than a picturesque form of the same area, which matters more the larger the house gets: a plain hipped or gabled roof costs substantially less to cover than a complex one, and on a 5,000 square foot house that difference is a serious sum.

A two-story form also uses less roof per square foot of living space than a ranch would, which is a genuine efficiency at this scale.

Where a colonial of this size has been extended or altered — and at forty-five years many will have been — the additions are frequently where the roof gets complicated, with new valleys and junctions where the extension meets the original. Those are exactly where roofs fail first, and they are worth an explicit look rather than a glance.

A neighborhood entirely of colonials also cannot reach the single-level buyer pool at all. People for whom a ranch is a requirement rather than a preference will be looking elsewhere, and a seller should not expect to reach them — which is worth knowing when setting expectations about who the buyer will be.

East of Dixboro, and the ground around it

This position sits on the northeast side beyond Dixboro Road, where the city gives way to Ann Arbor Township and Superior Township, with US-23 a short run east.

School assignment follows a third line again.

This part of the county is close to the University of Michigan's eastern properties: the Matthaei Botanical Gardens on Dixboro, and the North Campus Research Complex beyond. Institutional land is the most durable kind of neighbor — an institution holds ground for its own long-term purposes rather than as a business that can be sold — and that gives this side of the county more durable green than its development pattern would suggest.

Where any open ground adjoins a specific lot, though, the ownership question decides its durability, and out here working agricultural land is a common answer. Farmland is privately owned working land protected only by its owner's current use and whatever zoning and wetland rules apply, unless it is enrolled in a state farmland preservation program or a county purchase-of-development-rights arrangement — and that is a free question with a real answer.

Plymouth-Ann Arbor Road is a through route, so the ordinary corridor trade-off applies and varies with distance and orientation.

An Ann Arbor address is not necessarily the City of Ann Arbor

The City of Ann Arbor is ringed by townships — Scio, Pittsfield, Ann Arbor, Superior and Lodi among them — whose mailing addresses read Ann Arbor. A mailing address is a delivery route rather than a jurisdiction.

Each township is a separate government with its own board, tax rate, services, zoning and assessor. The rate difference between a city parcel and a township one is real and recurring, which is why comparable sales must be matched on municipality. Rates and taxable values both change, so compare the current millage and the parcel's own taxable value rather than a remembered difference; a tax bill arrives on the local schedule, and a lender collects an estimated share of it monthly.

School assignment follows a third line again. Three distinct versions of the split exist around here — Ann Arbor addresses with Pittsfield taxes and Saline schools; Pittsfield taxes with Ann Arbor schools; and a Ypsilanti address with Pittsfield taxes and Ann Arbor schools — which together show that no direction of inference works.

Schools

Tanglewood is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools. District boundaries are redrawn from time to time.

Buying or selling here

The piping, the zones and the size band are the three things that decide an analysis here.

For a seller of a house at the upper end, the analysis has to be constructed rather than looked up, and the material that makes it possible is the year built, documentation of the supply piping, dated records for the roof and mechanicals, the number of heating and cooling zones, and named comparables from the wider area. An appraiser given only a neighborhood and a square footage will not price a 5,000 square foot house correctly.